Allan Massie, Goodacres 1952-1957, was a distinguished journalist, novelist, and historian whose writing earned him wide respect and admiration. A proud member of the Glenalmond community, Allan’s connection to the school was deep and enduring, spanning generations of his family.

We are honoured to share a heartfelt tribute written by his son, Alex Massie, reflecting on the remarkable life and legacy of his father. To view the original article, click here.

Allan Massie, 1938-2026

Father died this afternoon.

Outside, my sister’s Dandie Dinmont terrier was barking in the garden as he quietly slipped away. It was a good and gentle end to a good and gentle life, the sort of death many of many of us might wish for ourselves: at peace, in bed, surrounded by all his children.

These past few days have been a kind of liminal space during which time has slowed almost to a standstill. It has felt somehow both weightless and oppressive and even the awareness such feelings are by no means unique - for they must come to us all, in time - has provided only a modest dollop of consolation. I wanted to write this piece some time ago but could not bring myself to begin it until this evening.

For it was a long life and a full one. As long as I can recall, our lives were filled with books and newspapers. Words poured forth from dad’s typewriter in a torrent that endured for more than half a century. If it weren’t for what he termed his “wretched cancer” he’d be writing still.

His journalistic output alone could be considered prodigious: thousands of book reviews, a nearly equal number of columns on politics and sport, and much else besides. He was proud to be a hack and enough of a freelancer to know that no assignment was beneath his dignity (or financial interest). He wrote for The Scotsman for 50 years and served tours penning columns and reviews for The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Scottish Daily Mail, The Glasgow Herald, The Spectator, The Literary Review, The Wall Street Journal, and many, many, other titles.

Certain memories remain clear as diamonds. I recall the Telegraph phoning on the morning of the Dunblane shootings, asking for dad to write 1,000 words for the next day’s paper. He wasn’t at home, being - by complete and remarkable coincidence - on his way to a meeting with the editor at the newspaper’s office. That meeting never happened as father was steered to the nearest available desk and asked to use a computer for, I think, the first time in his life. (Well into the 21st century he was still filing copy by fax and countless hacks have endured the pain of inputting his ash-stained, badly-typed, copy into their papers’ editorial systems. A rite of passage, I suppose, if only of a kind.)

Another time, later I think, I remember being brought up short by a line in a Scotland on Sunday profile written about dad in which an anonymous individual observed that “When I see him shopping in Galashiels, I want to punch him in the face”. A reminder, if nothing else, that the chief difference in feedback these days is that it is easier for malcontents to tell you such things to your (digital) face. In their own way, everyone is a critic and technology changes delivery more surely than it alters sentiment. Such are the breaks.

He always denied that his journalism ever obstructed his literary alter ego but few people ever believed that could possibly be true and in his final times he grudgingly conceded that all those other folk might have had a point. But school fees - a voluntary expense, certainly, but a weighty one nonetheless - required sacrifices and he was a professional writer, not an amateur, and so words had to be put to work. In this, as in much else, the spirit of Sir Walter Scott - whom he considered the greatest of Scotsmen - was his mentor and guide.

He was, I think, a writer’s writer. That is to say, his fiction was more highly esteemed amongst his peers than with the general public who purchased his novels in respectable though, alas, never pleasingly outrageous, quantities. And there was, it must be said, a lot of fiction. Some two dozen novels as well as more than half a dozen non-fiction works whose own subjects demonstrated the old man’s formidable range. For he was as comfortable writing a history of the Stuart dynasty as he was penning an account of the history of Scottish rugby.

His novels also ranged widely. He began with comedies of manners - very much in the school of Evelyn Waugh - but his chief interests were political and historical. He believed writing was a form of carpentry: style could be important but function trumped form. He disliked mannered or overly-perfumed prose and his own style was clipped and epigrammatic. “I am a dandy who can no longer be bothered to dress” was the arresting - to my mind - first line of “The Death of Men”, his roman a clef about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro.

That remains one of his best, alongside “Augustus” and “Tiberius” (the first two of six novels set in ancient Rome) and his loosely-connected WW2 trio, “A Question of Loyalties” (France), “The Sins of the Father” (Germany) and “Shadows of Empire” (Britain). It is a considerable disappointment that none of these were ever turned into high-class television (there’s still time, Netflix).

He didn’t write about Scotland very much and, Scotland-being-Scotland, this was considered modestly outrageous. Rightly, he was irked by talk of a Scottish “literary renaissance” in the 1980s and 90s correctly noting that this presupposed a previous death which was, you know, something about which the likes of Muriel Spark, Eric Linklater, James Kennaway and plenty of others might have had something to say.

Still, surveys of contemporary Scottish literature sometimes contrived to ignore his output. He occupied an awkward space: in Scotland and from Scotland but not, somehow, entirely of Scotland. That gave him a paradoxical position: a notionally “establishment” voice (Glenalmond, Cambridge, middle-class and centre-right) who was also, in other respects, a kind of outsider in a Scotland which had decided it didn’t much like any of these things.

Journalistically, this was an advantageous perch from which to view the world. As Scotland moved left in the 1980s there was an opening for someone who could explain this to a London-based audience. When such opportunities arrive, the sensible freelancer knows this is the time for the filling of boots. (Jocksplaining is a noble calling and now something of a family business.)

His few Scottish novels tend to be minor ones but I like them none the less for that. He wrote “The Hanging Tree”, a tale of slaughter and mayhem in the Reviving years on the Scottish border, at a time when he was concerned his fiction was becoming “too cerebral”. Reviewers weren’t quite sure what to make of it. They came expecting chablis and were served Laphroaig instead. Meanwhile, his Walter Scott novel, “The Ragged Lion” is perhaps the ideal gateway to the great man’s own novels.

And if his countrymen sometimes doubted his bona fides others never did. “Very Scotch” was Anthony Powell’s not-entirely-approving verdict. “A touch of the dominie about him” Christopher Hitchens once told me, recalling a review that was a little more pointed than he might have liked. But Christopher said this with a smile, knowing the rules of the game. Stone-casters forfeit the right to complain. Other writers were not always quite so level-headed. One Booker-shortlisted novelist asked dad if he would cease reviewing her work on the grounds that he clearly didn’t like it and, consequently, was responsible for her failure to sell more books in Scotland.

Politically, he thought that Scotland was a place which liked to kid itself. It wasn’t hopeless, just mediocre. He looked at the swaggering confidence of nineteenth century Scotland and contrasted it with what he saw as the country’s long twentieth century decline. The country became, he thought, timid and small-c conservative, resigned to its fate and hostile to reform. He didn’t entirely approve of Alex Salmond but he could recognise that Salmond at least attempted to apply some kind of cattle prod to a country dearly in need of such stimulus.

Similarly, Thatcherism was necessary and widely and deliberately misunderstood in a Scotland that would once have agreed with the sentiments underpinning the Iron Lady’s worldview: provincial, moralising, protestant. He was not much of a Thatcherite himself, however, being a little too wet for that. He was in truth more of a European-style Christian Democrat than anything else. The EU was imperfect in many ways but it had made war between France and Germany unthinkable and that must count for something.

His best and most complex novels were explorations of ethical and moral dilemmas. “A Question of Loyalties”, set in Vichy France, is probably the finest. Could a man simultaneously be a patriot and save in Petain’s Vichy regime? If he could, might be be able to survive the experience? (The answers are Yes and then No). It was typical of dad, I think, that he asked, in effect, “What would you have done in those circumstances?” and then, as a supplementary inquiry, “Are you sure?”

The ironies and ambiguities of history were his territory. Is it possible to lead a decent private life in indecent public times? How can the shadows cast by history be escaped? And, perhaps above all, is there any chance of humans ever learning that ideology, however attractive it might initially seem, eventually poisons everything it touches while consuming those who adhere to ideology just as surely as it condemns those who dare oppose it. Gloomy, I suppose, but not obviously incorrect. “Every society”, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “rests on the death of men”.

The good thing about Scotland, then, is that Scottish politics was not a matter of life and death. He enjoyed quoting Hugh MacDiarmid’s line that “The trouble with Scotland is that there’s nobody worth killing” while recognising that banality has its consolations too. And he was, I think, right. Consider the possibility, for instance, that it is a feature of literature’s decline that even the independence referendum has not, as yet, sparked another tilt at The Great Scottish Novel.

Last month David Robinson, one of dad’s many literary editors at The Scotsman, wrote a lovely piece about the old boy. The reaction to it touched him deeply while moving his children to something close to tears. For it became a kind of living funeral, a slippage of time in which the future was made present. The kindness of his peers was lovely but as nothing compared to that evinced by readers. Dad was a writer and no writer, be they ever so modest, is entirely without ego, vanity, and pride. He enjoyed having some of those messages read to him.

He fought certain battles and won some of them. Simon Raven’s publisher paid for him to leave London on the grounds that remaining in the capital was prejudicial to both his health and his work. I have sometimes wondered if dad’s decision to move his family to the Scottish Borders more than 40 years ago was prompted by a comparable appreciation that the temptations of metropolitan life should be strictly rationed. Such rationing, admittedly, should not be confused with abstinence. There remained plenty of lost weekends and the occasional lost week too until a spell at the Priory - an environment he took to with relish, finding it not unlike a boarding school populated by a broader range of interesting characters than is customarily the case in such institutions - put an end to all that.

Tobacco, on the other hand, remained a faithful and reliable friend. I think he must have smoked a million cigarettes and lord-knows-how-many cigars. Filterless Gitanes and filthy Toscano cigars, since you ask. He had his last cigar less than a fortnight ago and although he had by that stage become something of a fire-raising risk, I wish he could have occasion to smoke one more.

He was a good and kind man and there are many younger writers and others for whom he has been a source of encouragement and much else besides. He was also - and forgive me for stressing this but it does feel important - a great father. We shall miss him greatly while being consoled that all those words do form and furnish a kind of self-made monument. So too, still more significantly, do a thousand individual and personal and family moments; a collage from which a picture on a mighty scale may be formed.